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Missing the Mark
A group called the Wild Fish Conservancy petitioned to have Gulf of Alaska Chinook Salmon listed as an endangered species this year. Late last month, the National Marine Fisheries Service decided the question was worth a serious look.
A listing would have huge implications for Alaska fisheries, both sport and commercial. After reading a press release the Alaska Department of Fish & Game put out this week, I'm more than a little worried whether the State of Alaska is going to take it seriously.
Our state has some good arguments to make. ADF&G is right to point out that salmon stocks are more abundant now than when Alaska took over management from the feds back in 1960. That's on point because an ESA listing would put a whole lot of management decisions back under Uncle Sam.
The department also points out that not meeting our escapement goals (the number of adult kings getting up the rivers to spawn) doesn't mean they're going extinct. Those goals are based on the Alaska Constitution's requirement to manage for both “sustained yield” and "maximum use," so there is genuinely some breathing room between missing the escapement target and eradication.
But when the department pooh-poohs the problem of Chinook not surviving well enough in the oceans to come back and spawn in Alaska rivers? That's where they lose me. If they don't get serious about it, they'll lose the federal scientists evaluating the petition, too.
Essentially, ADF&G's argument boils down to saying: 'we can’t know what happens out in the great big ocean, and if ocean conditions improve, the fish will be fine.' That doesn't fly very far in the face of strong scientific evidence that shows our oceans getting less habitable over time, not better.
When ADF&G writes "The use of long-term climate models to predict the status of Chinook stocks into the future requires a host of assumptions that may or may not be accurate," they're not lying. But they're putting their departmental head in the sand. International consensus models have varied from accurate to too optimistic for decades. Arctic sea ice cover is shrinking faster than predicted. Sea levels are rising faster. The oceans are warming and getting more acidic. If our managers don't account for that, the fish are in trouble.
If the state's response to this ESA petition is to mumble and shrug about ocean conditions like a high school sophomore who didn't bother doing the homework, the very best case scenario is more decline in our salmon stocks. But it's also likely that will be combined with a raft of new federal rules under a new 'endangered' status for chinook salmon.
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